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Microsoft will end support for Windows Server 2003 and Server 2003 R2 on July 14, 2015

Posted by Jatech on 3 September, 2014

What does end of support mean? End of support can have a dramatic impact on your business. It will mean no more updates or patches from Microsoft, which can result in a less stable and less secure infrastructure.

No Updates - Microsoft will no longer develop or release any updates after ending support for Windows Server 2003/2003R2. To put this in perspective there were 37 critical updates released in 2013 for Server 2003/2003R2. This means that if a security vulnerability is discovered in the operating system it will never be fixed.

No Compliance - after support ends, your organisation will likely fail to meet most industry-wide compliance standards. This could result in lost business or may dramatically increase the cost of doing business.

What can be done? - Our consultants will work with your I.T. staff to plan a migration away from Server 2003/2003R2 to a supported platform. The first step would be to discover and catalogue the software and roles on the server. This list would then be assessed to check for complexity and business risk and then we would recommend either new server(s) to replace the obsolete ones or a move to cloud-based services.